Lucy is a dishevelled young nobody looking for quick money, sold out by an opportunistic friend who capitalised on her desperation. Only neither of them realised what they were getting into…
Instead of an easy buck Lucy finds herself in a high stress scenario, fronting a group of strange men in a boardroom, who talk in both foreign languages and cryptic and foreboding English. Lucy is told not to struggle. She is told not to resist.
She is never told not to worry.
Lucy wakes up acutely aware that not all is right. A quick check of her body informs her that she has been operated on and a quick check of the surroundings finds only unfamiliarity and reason for concern. This is confirmed when a particularly nasty young man walks in, kicks her in the guts, and leaves. There is another feeling (besides stomach pain) that suggests something is very different.
Lucy should have hooked up with Bradley Cooper from Limitless, not only because he and Johannson are flawless examples of humanity, but because in both films the hero finds themselves with the ultimate cheat code, unlocking the full power of the human brain.
Where Lucy was previously a typical slacker youth, she now enters every room with the confidence of Liam Neeson in Taken, only if he had The Social Network scriptwriter penning his dialogue. As the film progresses her brain usage increases. (At 40% she can make the bullets fall out of guns.) The scuzzy businessmen who performed the initial procedure want their property back, and Lucy surmises that the only non-perfect brain that can help her belongs to the brain scientist Professor Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman) who lives continents away.
For a film with allegedly cerebral subject matter, Lucy has a high body count, allowing the premise to pretend that the film is smarter than it is. In reality it is a pastiche of elements from more interesting films, The Matrix, and the aforementioned Limitless among them.
It is quite entertaining though in a limited way. It’s generally compelling to see someone obviously several steps ahead of the rest, except when it becomes pointless for their competitors to continue. Scarlett Johannson is fine in the role, her turn as the Black Widow proves that she can hold an action stance, but while the film sees her with 100% brain utilisation, it only uses 17% of her body. That’s a dangerously low number for a predominantly male audience.
Speaking of a male audience, you cant help but think if a guy worked out how to use 100% brain capacity; he would still use that power to type ‘boobs’ upside down on a calculator…
Lucy is nice but hardly original premise which is rapidly homogenised into a film reminiscent of many others.
Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. Films about utilising the maximum potential of our brain matter only serve to show just how Hollywood often settles for the mandated minimum.
